Missing Context on the Internet Social Networks

Not written out, just force-faded out. Arrest might be my only opportunity.

Wrote this a couple days ago. It has attracted no likes, emojis, or comments. My posts, especially longer ones and those that include my homemade videos rarely make it to the News feed, and FB friends are generally reticent to come directly to my page because of my pattern of resistance to Facebook wrist slaps and my refusal not to say politically incorrect, non-Woke things in my words and graphics. Back in the spring, a longtime FB friend informed me he had just taken a new job in which employee social network activity is monitored. He asked me, apologetically, not to communicate with him directly anymore. His mother is still a sometime visitor though. At any rate, rather than have my post die on the vine I’m reconstructing it here at Instapunk Returns, where I have had 40,000 views in about four years of on-and-off posting. Don’t know who those people are, except that Blogger informs me all but 10 to 15 percent are not coming in from Facebook. So this is for them.

From a Facebook post dated September 7 , 2023:  

I’m going to ask you all to think today. I’m going to ask for some of your time, maybe as much as a couple of hours. If you can’t do it today, come back over the weekend. I’m going to give you two shots at my most important source materials, one here and another in the Comments section. 

Why am I doing this? On Bannon’s War Room this morning, he over-indulged in his most annoying vice, a succession of clips from MSNBC, CNN, and uniquely today, a grandstanding formal speech by Mike Pence in New Hampshire, formerly the “Live Free or Die” state. Most annoyingly in these inflammatory show openers, he appears on screen after the clips and does not deal specifically with their content other than to characterize it as wrong, sick, and filled with lies of commission and omission.

What he did again this morning. Then he played the same Pence excerpt he played in the opening AGAIN. And he told us Pence had had the nerve to call his speech after Reagan’s classic oration in 1964, “A Time for Choosing.” He was claiming himself as Reagan’s true Republican heir, the only legitimate candidate representing the conservative tradition in American politics.

It was time for Bannon, if he wanted to talk, to dig into the truth of the matter, something beyond merely informing us that we, his ‘posse,‘ are the true conservatives, the “Uber-Conservatives” the RINOs are as terrified of as the Democrats.

So I’m giving you all a chance to arm yourselves against a blatantly false meme being used by RINOs and even imitation conservatives in their declarations about the Republican legacy. 

What’s the meme? That the conservative way is, and has been, for 50 years the Way of Ronald Reagan, who is actually being cited — as Pence does — as the “real” Republican Party Trump’s common populists are seeking to overthrow with an anti-Democratic Huey Long-style cult of personality. 

I am old enough to remember what a grotesque lie this is. What was historically the “real” Republican Party died an ugly death in 1932, with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Democrats acquired what became permanent majorities in Congress and established the federal government infrastructure which ultimately became the Deep State that’s running amok today. The only Republican voices favorably covered by a press establishment that was already captive to the left in the pst-FDR years were GOP Congressional minority leaders Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative Gerald Ford. They were good-humored, politically impotent, and their only form of resistance was joint press conferences that were entertainingly irreverent enough to be called “The Ev & Jerry Show.”

It took Republicans 20 years to regain the White House. In 1952, both Democrats and Republicans wooed Eisenhower with an eye to ending Truman’s stalemate war in Korea. Eisenhower was what this narrative suggests — a moderate who knew he had to accept the permanent change in the role and scope of federal government and did what he still could, notably build the postwar infrastructure of America and pass the first meaningful Civil Rights legislation since Woodrow Wilson had given the Democrat stamp of approval to Jim Crow. Interestingly, though, Ike’s final speech was a not well understood warning about the ominous rise of what he called the military-industrial complex. How right he was is only becoming obvious in the 21st Century.

Neither of the next two Republican presidents were conservatives as Pence misrepresents the term. Nixon was Ike’s VP, a smart pragmatist who got us out of Vietnam just as Ike had gotten us out of Korea. (“Democrats start wars, Republicans end them” was a truism till the Bushies came along…) But Nixon also caved in to Democrat Keynesian economics to spend the way out of recession and try wage & price controls to rein in inflation. Gerald Ford was still the straight man of the Ev & Jerry Show. He was also the eventual catalyst for a successful rebellion against the generations of Democrat-Lite Republican politicians who had learned how to get elected in a post-New Deal political environment. Jerry Ford was the harmless replacement VP after Agnew was done in by Watergate; the RINOs used him to solve a problem. Their real preference was Nelson Rockefeller, too liberal for some, who became the appointed VP of an unelected President. What the Democrat coup known as Watergate bequeathed to the nation.

Which is when Ronald Reagan upset the apple cart. To him, Ford was just more of the same “go along to get along” eunuch Republicans who gave lip service to limiting government and nothing more (uh, Pence and Kevin McCarthy Republicans?). He mounted a primary campaign against Ford, which was so startlingly effective that there was even convention talk of innovating a kind of co-presidency between Ford and, um, VP Reagan. Reagan turned it down, lost the nomination, and seemed to become just another failed upstart. I saw him in person before he ran again. At a rubber chicken dinner in Philly, a speech to some conservative org or other. I was galvanized. He wasn't done after all. And the charisma was very real.

Time to give you a little personal history involving Reagan. His introduction to presidential politics was unique, a televised campaign speech for Barry Goldwater, the true conservative (everywhere dismissed as a reactionary John Bircher) who had stolen the nomination from Rockefeller by a populist appeal to the generation who had grown up under the heavy hand of FDR. (My Dad was a WWII pilot who had flown in FDR’s funeral. Ordered to do a flyover at 1,000 feet, to a man they risked court-martial by buzzing the proceedings at 500 ft; they had lost friends to the phony submarine scare in 1944 that aided the senile president’s fourth election bid. They got away with it.) Why I was seated in front of the old B&W TV on the night Ronald Reagan delivered the spellbinding paean to real conservatism and Barry Goldwater that became known as ”The Speech.” Saw it several more times, washed cars with my fifth grade class to earn money I handed to Goldwater personally in Philadelphia at the Union Club. And then watched the disastrous one-term presidency of LBJ without ever being able to take my eye off politics again.

The nation’s press probably hated Reagan as much as they now hate Trump. They just couldn’t get away with the open warfare that lefty politics has smuggled into the mass media “narrative” since Watergate and the Gore tantrum of 2000. They blamed Reagan, still do, for everything that went wrong in his 8 years, notably the big spending and deficits passed by Congress that Pence is now likewise trying to blame Trump for, as well as irresponsible tax cuts, and the military buildup and war-mongering rhetoric that finally pushed the Soviet Union into financial ruin. The Reagan hatred was an 8-year constant. I can still hear Bryant Gumbel sneering at Reagan every morning on the Today Show. I remember more fondly (a favorite political memory in fact) the night of the 1980 election, which lying polls and pundits had been predicting as (or just hoping for) a narrow Carter win. A friend and I turned on his television expecting a long, possibly painful night. But as the first polls closed, it was already over. A landslide for Reagan. The erstwhile silent populists had spoken with their ballots. The “nonpartisan” news anchors were shocked, devastated, inconsolable, in mourning. (Well, anybody remember election night in 2016? Same faces on TV as 1980.)

Eight years of Reagan were the last time before Trump that America was riding on a triumphant high. The Miracle on Ice, flag waving, a resurgence of American pride, abundant prosperity in response to those irresponsible tax cuts, and relative peace in foreign affairs, meaning no endless meat-grinders of American troops in wars without clear objectives. Runaway spending? Democrats still controlled the Congress with a huge majority in the House. 

The conservative “tradition“ that Pence wants to invoke began in 1980 and died when Reagan was buried and mourned by millions who watched him lie in state knowing his like probably would not come again. He hadn’t reduced the size of government, but he had tried, and he did succeed in making America safe from the Soviet Communists after 70 years of the Cold War, an achievement bestowed by the media on the Soviet leader Gorbachev. And Reagan had no real heir to succeed him. Pence claims to be such an heir, but knows his mentor so little that he regards Trump as a detestable break from the sacred Reagan Way (though when Trump met Reagan in the White House, the latter suggested the former should consider politics himself after their chat…)

The two Republican presidents between Reagan and Trump were Bushies. The one called 41 was an establishment guy from the git-go, an unashamed globalist who lost because he didn’t take out Saddam Hussein when he had the chance (thus guaranteeing Iraq War 2), raised taxes when he swore a solemn oath — “Read my lips” — he never would, and was so much a silver spoon elitist that he lost a chunk of approval in the polls for not knowing how a supermarket scanner worked. The one they called 43 was his father’s (prodigal) son, a so-called “compassionate conservative” who never vetoed a single congressional spending bill, repeated his father’s un-Republican example by starting rather than ending two wars, and was too lacking in principle to take a stand against the incredibly corrupt subprime mortgage hoax that nearly killed the American economy, thus paving the way for Obama.

And who did the “conservatives” run against the extreme left-winger Obama? The detestable RINO McCain, who all but endorsed his opponent before Election Day, and for the first and only time in his life, losing gracefully after he subsided into defeat. Next time it was Romney’s turn (son of RINO George Romney the ‘64 Goldwater Hater, meaning more GOP father-son career handoffs…), and he was no conservative either but a former governor of Massachusetts who did his own trial run of socialized medicine and said the right words about free market capitalism when all he knew about entrepreneurship was making a fortune as a job-killing corporate raider. He lost too, because he could never offer a reason why he should be President. Though war was a twinkle in his eye too, and the debate hostess disapproved him into a stammering non-response when he named Russia as an existential threat to the U.S.

The conservative tradition Pence hearkens to does not exist. Reagan (have to tell you, AutoCorrupt does NOT want me to type that name and keeps turning it into ‘Repagan’) was absolutely the exception to the rule of RINOs, who have been complicit in all the crimes against the Constitution and the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the UniParty desires to exterminate from its planned neo-communist chattel state of China.

Why did it take Trump to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe? Because time after time after time Republican presidents have been sold a bill of goods about conservative judicial candidates only to see them turn left as soon they entered the lobby of the Court Building. Earl Warren, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony “Swing Vote” Kennedy, David Souter, John Roberts, etc, etc. The so-called Republican establishment never wanted to overturn Roe. Too much electoral downside If it ever happened. Millions of dead babies was an acceptable price for not rocking the boat. Interestingly, the 50-year conservative tradition Pence hangs his hat on began in 1973, when Warren Burger was Chief Justice (nominated by Richard Nixon) of the Supreme Court that gave us Roe v. Wade, incidentally the same year that Nixon‘s disastrous Watergate downfall began. Hell of a year for Pence to celebrate as an anniversary of conservative principle. The kindest interpretation is that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

So what am I giving you here? Nobody treats the controlling RINO Wing of the Republican Party as a definable real thing. I do In the link below. It’s the first of several highly relevant articles at the Deerhound Diary I’m giving you in one go. In my dotage here, I imagine you reading the first one and then working your way through all of them, realizing how fundamentally accurate they are as you go. Take note of the original posting dates of the articles. They move backward in time from 2020 to 2013. Ten years back from today. I go farther back than that, of course, but I take responsibility for the things I have written and said in the past. Proof that I am not the faddist Pence accuses populists of being.

Something much older than those articles is a graphic I assembled for you of excerpts from ‘The Glossary‘ of Shuteye Nation written back in 2000. (Comment 1.) The hyperlinks don’t work here, obviously, but they do at the site where they still reside (shuteye2000 dot com). The world the definitions describe is still the one we’re living in, and the world Pence thinks we’re too dumb to know Is a corrupt and doomed ripoff.

I am also giving you, inside this post, a link to the complete video of Mike Pence’s disgraceful falsehoods about Republicans and the many millions of Americans who support Trump against our second doofus VP from Indiana in a row. I am likewise preparing an audio file of pertinent excerpts from that speech (not completed as of this posting) to be added in a comments so you can copy it, own it, and use it elsewhere. [UPDATE. Now posted in Comment 6.]

Beyond that, i’m including in the Comments a link to a video of “The Speech” and another of Eisenhower’s haunting farewell address from the White House. (Comments 2 and 3.)

Finally, a pair of Comments (Nos. 4 and 5) linking to two relevant books (out of 78) in The Boomer Bible: 1) The Book of the VIP Adam (Past Testament), and 2) The Epistle to the Hallites (Present Testament). 

Now then… the Pence Speech:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQ1eNyG1Fo

Give the rest of the sources some real attention too. A bunch of stuff that‘s worthwhile putting all in one place and dealing with them all at one time, not separately at indiscriminate intervals. They’re what we’re usually missing, a comprehensive context through time.

The Primary Link, an offering of half a dozen related posts from my blog The Deerhound Diary. They appear in order of relevance, not by design but happenstance. The last one, written back in 2013, deals with the abuses committed by the nation’s intelligence services. Go figure. The one before that contains my proposed announcement speech by Sarah Palin for the 2012 presidential nomination. Never happened of course. But a cat can look at a king (or queen), right?

From THE DEERHOUND DIARY (once banned in toto by Facebook. For years…)

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Now for the promised Comments:

1. From Shuteye Nation’s The Glossary.* The whole thing is over 10,000 words long and hyperlinked internally (and beyond) at the site….

*A hyperlink to the online file of The Glossary has been used here because only one link per comment is possible on FB. The live file shows how hyperlinks interact in fleshing out definitions. Other parts of Shuteye Nation, accessible from the header, reference specific Glossary definitions via a circular degree-sign superscript.

2. Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing (1964)….

3. Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Speech (1960)...

4. TBB, The Book of the VIP Adam (1991)….

*The graphic is added here and is not the link to the book. Take the hyperlink.

5. TBB, The Mandate of the Ultra-Harriers Sam and Jerry for the Hallites (1991)….

The ‘Previous’ and ‘Table of Contents’ links also work. In this case the 

previous book is Swarthmorons, like other books relevant to this one…

*The graphic is added here and is not the link to the book. Take the hyperlink.

6. Audio file of key excerpts from Pence’s imitation-Reagan speech. He’s an ignorant phony, a backstabber, and a liar who compares Trump to Huey Long…. 

There you have it. The “Conservative” has spoken.